Thoughts Around New Pedagogy Pilot

”Yes – this is awesome”. That was my first thought when I saw the final outputs and presentations of student projects in presentation session in late June. This is pretty much the core what so called “new pedagogy” is all about. Doing practical things with concrete outputs. Learning while doing them and learning from your team-mates. Working and learning together. Actually, some of those presented project outputs could have some commercial potentiality as well. Like first prototypes of nutritive sweets made of local fruit tamarind or improving peanut buttering and repackaging them to new markets.

Project outputs above were results of the new pedagogy pilot implementation in information services course headed by Ms Getrude Ntulo. I already witnessed some good things happening while I visited in TUDARCo in mid-April. Starting projects with local community (micro E’s), having training sessions with icebreakers and reading circles on given topics related to projects. We have started something good and this is a good base to go forward.

Our Tanzanian colleagues are coming to visit us in mid-September. Looking forward to that visit and continuation of the work for new pedagogy implementation in TUDARCo. I am glad that we are with open mind and are ready to try new things in every day learning. This is something what we have done many times here in TUAS. Sometimes it feels that learning is so slow but in many cases it has paid off. It just takes courage to try to do something new in the different way and that is something I feel we are doing with our TUDARCo colleagues.

Looking forward to fall 2018 action!

-Markku-